The adventures of teaching computing science to university students

National Hack the Government Day – Aberdeen

Come to the event at the University of Aberdeen and use open data to make government work better for you. Come and meet other students, developers, and designers to develop useful apps to make life easier using data that’s produced by the government at local, regional or national levels. We’re holding a remote version of the same NHGD event being organised by Rewired State at the Guardian offices in London.

The goal is to make government work better for us the people using data it already has. This is your chance to show that your ideas can have an impact and that we can do it better than the big firms.

We’ll provide the space and some refreshments, you come with ideas and enthusiasm.

Preliminaries

Before you come your laptop should be set up to work well with a team depending upon your specialty. This needs to be done before you come in order to maximize the day we have available. This could include

a version control system such as Git so that you can easily collaborate with your team

a programming language such as Ruby and Rails, or Java, and/or the Android SDK, or iOS if you’re an iPhone/iPad developer

web development tools to create and edit web pages using HTML and CSS

suitable graphics tools for design work

This is not a chance to learn how to program, but rather a chance to show your design and development skills, and get experience working with others. This means we’ll provide support to help you with tools, but we’ll not teach you programming, or design.

Bring your ideas, and think up others

By all means come with an idea in mind and look for people on the day to help you implement it. Come and scratch your itch with us.

Similarly, if you just want to design and develop things, then come along too. Also do look through what others have done in the past for other Rewired State hackdays, and we’ll hopefully have some ideas that you can work with too.

In order to maximize time, and to let people mull over ideas, do feel free to share ideas in the comments below.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be a big thing, even making an app to make it easier to read the RSS feed of Aberdeen events would be useful.

We hope to have prizes on the day for categories determined on the day, such as app to save the most money, app most likely to be used by the most people and such.

Hi Bruce – I’m sorry I won’t be able to make it on the 26th, but just thought I’d mention a couple of other useful resources for the developers.

At http://publishmydata.com/data we have a copy of the OS postcode dataset and a copy of the data.gov.uk Administrative Geography dataset. Having them both on the same SPARQL endpoint is handy for the common task of working out how a postcode relates to wards, local authority areas etc.

And (together with Ian Watt and Jeff Pan), we hope to have the first one or two Aberdeen City Council Linked Data datasets online by then. Will let you know how that goes.